Torque3D seems to finally get a Linux port!

Following the release of the Torque3D engine under the MIT license (latest release 3.5 here), there was a lot of back and forth regarding a port to Linux (the engine actually used to have a good Linux port, but that one was dropped a few years back). At some point there was even an official Kickstarter crowed-funding attempt, which however failed to reach the estimated funds (but nether the less

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December RTS updates

Merry Christmas from FreeGamer!As a nice present from the 0 A.D. team, the new Alpha 15 Osiris was released today:Lots of great new features and especially multiplayer games should be now much easier to do with hosting improvements and a lobby for browsing available games.Another open-source RTS engine (using Mono/C# though) has also released a new version: OpenRA. Currently it is still geared to

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Let's Play Permissions for Open Source Games With Free Art

Let's Play (LP) is an uprising form of previewing and experiencing video games.While a review summarizes the experience, a LP allows to look a player over their shoulder and indirectly experience the game from one perspective in its entirety - if both Let's Player and viewer have the endurance. LPs have many styles: non-commented, informational, humorous... And their production quality

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Reminder: 1 week left to vote

Voting for the Linux Game Awards January 2014 will come to an end in about one week (24th of December). So if you haven't voted yet, don't waste any time!You can read more about the award in this older blog entry.

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Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME) version 1.1.0 and Steam edition

The great roguelike RPG Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME) is available as a new version (1.1.0) nicknamed "Full Steam Ahead". Here is a slightly older trailer for version 1.0.5.:Release highlights:New necromancer tree: AnimusAll achievements now feature beautiful 128x128 imagesImproved Alchemist interaction with its golemTons of fixes and balance adjustementsMany improvements for addon creators, including

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Help to ROTC:Ethernet to become fully open-source

The creator of the nice, but pretty niche, freeware game (but with Creative Commons licensed assets) Revenge of the Cats: Ethernet has just informed us that he started a Indiegogo campaign (target US$ 1500) to liberate the game.The current version still runs on an old closed source build of the Torque3D engine, but with the somewhat recent move to MIT licensing, it has now become possible to go f

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Progress on Octaforge

One of the newer engine/game projects I have been following closely is Octaforge. It is basically a fork of Tesseract, which in turn is an graphic improvement project by the makers of the well known Cube2 engine.The main difference with Octaforge is that aims to become a game SDK and platform for easy creation of mods; And one of its prime new features for this is full scriptability with Lua.Read

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Zelda can now be free as in freedom

Not only from the clutches of Ganondorf, but also from the dominion of proprietary software. All thanks to the magnificent Solarus Engine, a GPLed, SDL-based, 2D action RPG engine. This amazing project aims to provide a stable and easily customizable platform for users to create their own Zelda-like games, and so far, I must say, I am darn impressed by what I've seen. The engine already has two i

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Linux Game Awards voting open now!

Quietly in the background a group of open-source and Linux enthusiast websites (full disclosure: including FreeGamer ;) ) has developed a new platform for promoting open-source games: http://www.linuxgameawards.org/One of its regular features will be a monthly award and a related promotion drive for the winner on all affiliated sites. As a start, our community came up with the first 10 nominees f

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Holiday Racer 2.2 released (aka Stunt Rally)

Obviously someone is having a hard time with the winter in the northern hemisphere right now:More awesome screenshots of Stunt Rally 2.2 here, and don't miss the details of the new version in the full change log.Last but not least, discuss it on our forums :)

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Lips of Suna 0.8.0 released

And another great new release :)Our favorite work in progress & not quite serious anime RPG Lips of Suna bumps its release number to 0.8 (change-log).I know what you are thinking...Most notable changes:New player model and animations contributed by gruntunbur.Lots of sound effects contributed by qubodup.More powerful animation blending.Performance improvements.Better eye, face and hair color

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MegaGlest 3.9.0 released

Since I am having internet troubles as of late, I'll keep it short and hope it will actually come through:Megaglest 3.9.0 was released today, see changelog:v3.9.0- we hopefully now really solved the last out of sync problems for cross platform games.- animated tileset object support. ( like trees moving in the wind )- new tileset texturing possibilities- new tilesets birchforest, desert4 and upda

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New releases from the Worldforge project.

Yesterday saw the release of a new version of the client-side software "Ember" for the Worldforge project (an open-source MMO framework).The focus of this version was to improve the world-editing features, and if not yet included, the GoSC 2013 improvements (for example an updated terrain renderer) should arrive in Ember soon too.Speaking of the GoSC 2013: Another project benefiting from it under

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Quick reminder: Free The Monsters open game art crowd-funding

We talked about it before here, but now there is only about 2 days left and even though all funds go to the team regardless of if the goal is reached, they are still a long way off what then would need to create a nice set of openly licensed fantasy monsters.So please head over to their indiegogo fund-raiser page: "Free the Monsters" and donate.

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DevCorner: jMonkeyEngine SDK 3.0 (stealth) release

The maybe most user friendly and complete FOSS game engine jMonkey Engine 3, has recently released the final version 3.0 of their very nice SDK.Here is a list of the full changes:Engine- LWJGL base now works on MacOSX 10.7+ incl. Applets- Hardware Skinning- Shader Nodes- Better Character (beta)- New LOD Generator!- TangentBinormalGenerator was refactored- Better physics debug viewSDK- N

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Frogatto & Friends looking to be "greenlit" on Steam

We have mentioned in the past a few times that it is a common misconception that FOSS games need to be also "freeware", and in fact the opposite can be quite beneficial to the overall development of a game or the engine it is build on.The 2D jump & run  Frogatto & Friends has been for sale on mobile platforms for a while now, and its really high quality game-play and graphics are def

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Breaking news: The Dark Mod 2.0 stand alone version out now!

I guess quite a few people were waiting for this to finally happen :)Have a look at the release announcement here and the full change-log here.They also did a nice introduction video a few months ago:Haven't got the chance to try it myself yet, but this is high on my list of open-source games to play!

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Blender Game Making Challenge starts on the 20th of this month

While not necessary only for FOSS games, all will be done with the Blender3D included game engine (BGE). Check out their website here and/watch the video below:The overall theme will be announce on the 20th when the contest starts.

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Valyria Tear 0.6.0 released

I have to admit that we are a bit slow on reporting the news on FOSS gaming projects with we actually host ourselves via the freegamedev.net forums. Valyria Tear is sadly no exception, and their new 0.6.0 release has been out a few days already. Sorry to all whom this may concern.For those not in the loop, Valyria Tear is based on the engine of Hero of Allacrost and aims to be an all FOSS jRPG. T

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Fundraiser: Fantasy Creature under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike

Free the Monsters! is a collaborative Indiegogo campaign to create and share five fantasy creature 3d models under CC-BY-SA 3.05 3d models and 10 works of concept art will be released if the goal of USD5000 is reached.Perks include t-shirts and voting rights. Voting will be based on short creature descriptions. The top 10 will be turned into concept art and of those, the top 5 will be turned

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Stephen Cameron: Space Nerds in Space Interview and Crew Gameplay Video

A 15 minutes long video profile of Stephen Cameron was published on YouTube by Jack Younger - hacker (presumed) at TX/RX Labs.Stephen Cameron Video ProfileThe video includes an interview of Cameron's about his latest project Space Nerds in Space including inspiration and actual authentic gameplay video footage of the crew (highlights at 08:30).Video thumbnailsSome of Word War

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Fundraising for GPL game Plee the Bear

This is a guest post by Julien Jorge, developer, artist and musician behind the open source indie games Plee the Bear and Andy's Super Great Park, here to present the fundraising campaign he launched for the former. Some years ago, with the help of three of my friends and anonymous people on the web, I have created Plee the Bear, a great platformer in which you play an angry bear whose son has be

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New Alien Arena, with included alpha-demo of in development commercial spin-off

Yes, it looks like the developers behind the long running idTech2 based AlienArena are going make a more slower paced & 'tactical' spin-off and try to sell it. As before the engine will stay open-source (GPLv2), but the assets for the spin-off will stop being free-as-in-beer.Here is the official launch-trailer of the new update and the alpha demo:Beside the new game-play mode, they have also

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Flock 2013, OLCP Games, Gamification through Badges on Linux

There were some game development related events at Flock Fedora Contributor Conference, August 2013 in lovely Charleston, SC, US.Trigger Rally Map Workshop So far my contributions to Fedora were merely a few wiki edits but my conference proposals were well-received.Free Art Game Making presentation slideI ended up speaking about making games using free art and leading a Trigger Rally level b

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Alpha 14 and a crowd-funding campaign for 0 A.D.

Pretty interesting news from 0 A.D. today: They are having a Indigogo crowd-funding campaign.Note that this is a flexible funding campaign, so even if they don't reach their goals all money donated will go to the project.They also released a new Alpha version, codenamed Naukratis. Change-log would be too long to list here (which I consider a good thing ;) ), but here is a picture of some high-qua

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Today: Glamour, or how to hide irony about gender stereotypes very well...

Or something like that... because as much as I think FOSS games should cater to the other ermm... 2nd out of three(?) gender, I am not sure if this is meant ironic or not (description of the game Glamour):You are Maddeline, a young princess just turned 16. Now you're old enough to attend the royal balls and your fairy godmother will help you get ready for the most exciting dances.Watch out you

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WebGL dungeon crawler Moonshades now FOSS

More browser-based RPG goods for you today: the developer behind the game Moonshades recently indicated on the Opengameart.org forums that this neat old-school (ok not as old-school as Heroine Dusk) dungeon crawler is now fully open-source.Have a look at the alpha game-play:It seems the entire game (including the source-code) is released under the rather art focused Creative Commons Attribution (

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Browser based MMO: Ironbane

I wanted to write about this browser-based MMO game called Ironbane for a while, but never actually got around trying it (it's easy though, no need to register for the alpha currently, just hit play; but for me under Linux with Firefox 23 it just kept loading and loading... could have been my very slow connection though). Luckily the creator got into contact with us to remind me about it.Here is

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Assault Cube reloaded, version 2.5.8

I'm a bit hesitant to cover this game, as media licensing is a complete mess, but well some might enjoy playing it and the source-code is there ;)Here is a longish game-play video of Assault Cube Reloaded:You can follow the latest development and see the change-log here.P.S.: Funny to see some of the Red Eclipse artwork and Xonotic sounds (I think) reused, but I wouldn't want to open the can of w

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Lips of Suna 0.7.0 released

After a long hibernation a new version of the 3D RPG Lips of Suna was released today!Take that you, ermm brown something?More screenshots here, and there are quite a few great new features:New terrain system.More responsive controls.Real single player mode.New spell and enchantment systems.Many graphical improvements.Added limited scope game modes.Improved script performance.Extended character mo

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GSoC 2013 pushes SuperTuxKart forward!

If you follow our planet, this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code.Not showing most of the new features yet is this nice video featuring the mascot of OpenGameArt.org as a new player character:But their blog has many interesting technical de

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Stunt Rally 2.1 released

My luck... I do the reluctant once in two weeks post to keep the blog alive, and almost the next day is an unexpected big new release of a cool game ;)Ahh well... Stunt Rally 2.1 seems to have ventured into even less realistic spheres now:Awesome alien worlds in Stunt Rally 2.1A lot more (mostly more conventional) new screenshots can be seen here.All I need now is a nice unrealistically spongy ar

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Assorted news #1024

*hrmmpf*New FreeOrion 0.43 release.Unvanquished Alpha 18.Some news from the standalone idTech4 Hexen remake.Open-source reimplementation of Caesar3 engine picked up again.OpenMW 0.25.0 released.New Ya3dag 1.42 release.Files of the Open(GameArt)Bundle released under CC0.tl;dr: Just click on the links above :p

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Much activity for Zero-K and some other news

Zero-K, the probably coolest fully FOSS offspring of the SpringRTS engine has seen at least two new releases since it last crossed my mind to check their page... a pity actually as the new features of version 1.1.7.0 (and prior) seem quite nice.And for those not into the game (yet), there is now a channel with commented multi-player matches like this one: Just a pity that the game-play doesn't re

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DevCorner: Open (Game Art) Bundle

An interesting mixture to "pay what you want" and "ransom funding" has recently surfaced with the Open Bundle:You can buy all the offered game art and use them under the CC-by license and if the total threshold is reached (10k, 1 day remaining, 9.3k already pledged) all the game art (2d sprites and music) will be officially released under the CC0. A split of the funds is btw. shared with the EFF

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Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, funded!

The self described open-source rogue-like survivalcraft / driving game in a sci-fi zombie apocalypse has successfully reached its goal on Kickstarter, and one of the developers will now be able to work on it full-time for a few months to implement for example a back-end for proper graphics.But see and hear about it yourself:The first stretch-goal is close too, with 12 days remaining to pledge mo

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Open Source Never Dies

The beauty of open source is that projects never officially die as long as the source is available.Some classics simply keep moving forward because of this.  They get written off, domains expire, progress seems non-existent, but then somebody with a bit of knowledge and drive does something and the project is alive again!  That is the beauty of Free / Libre & Open Source Software.Su

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Data Dealer, an interesting project to fund!

The the last Kickstarter game project we featured was sadly not successful and with only 11 days to go it doesn't look too good for Data Dealer either. But this HTML5 and CC-by-SA licensed game project comes with a pretty cool idea and is quite playable already.It centers around the idea that services like Facebook & Google really arn't in the business of bringing you a good service (aka "If

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Unvanquished summer tournament

Given the often quite small online communities around FOSS games, one has to become creative on how to keep players and attract new ones. Regular tournaments are one of those good ideas, albeit one that is a lot of work organizing.One of the games that is still struggling to attract a stable player base is Unvanquished, even though the game is based on Tremulous and thus quite well developed game

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DevCorner: Underapprechiated game engines

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a fe

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Lost Sky Tactical J-RPG [PyGame]

Lost Sky is a PyGame-based Tactical J-RPG that runs on Linux, OS X and Windows.To play on a system that has mercurial and pygame installed, run: hg clone https://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-publiccd lost-sky-project-public/Story\ of\ a\ Lost\ Sky/chmod +x srpg.py./srpg.pyLost Sky screenshotsVideo: Lost Sky Gameplay: Tactical jRPG on Linux [PyGame] Story of a Lost Sky is a

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Xonotic 0.7 released

After an agonizingly long wait, I am happy to report that a new official release of the premier FOSS arena FPS Xonotic is available to the masses.Here is a nice (but slightly older) game-play video for those not having played Xonotic yet:Changes are quite extensive compared to the last official release... most notably an extensive update the the CTF mode, some neat additional features for competi

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DevCorner: Liberate some great Blender game art!

UPDATE: First set of files has been released (license CC0) and on my advise he added some stretch goals: 600$ > 3 game ready Enemies! (models, sfx, animations, effects)650$ > Dynamic optimized lighting system! (rich dynamic lighting with low resource usage )750$ > 4 new weapons!(model, texture, sound)850$ > Triple the amount of the actual props! (interactive objects,explosibles, new w

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Hedgewars 0.9.19 released

Everyone's favorite clone of worm-warfare, Hedgewars recently got a rather big new release as one of the developers pointed out to us by email.One of the new level themes for Hedgewars 0.9.19The changes are quite extensive, so instead of failing to summarize them here, check out the above linked quite extensive original release announcement.You can also have a look at this fan-made trailer if you

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WIP "OpenFlashpoint"

Here is another post about a project I found in the far ends of the internet ("here be dragons"), but which seems really promising never the less.But first of all a disclamer by the original creator:The screenshots you are about to see are not yet an eye candy, they're rather to be seen as a 'proof of concept' with lots of crappy placeholders. Work so far has mainly been done on the internal me

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